Spiceworks and Zendesk are both prominent contenders in the help desk and IT service management market. While Spiceworks offers a community-driven and budget-friendly model, Zendesk stands out with advanced integrations and customizability, providing more value to users seeking rich features.
Features: Spiceworks offers a comprehensive help desk and inventory management system with network scanning, ticketing, and asset tracking. It utilizes a strong user community for support and offers flexible reporting tools. Zendesk provides a sophisticated support platform featuring multi-channel integration, JIRA integration, and macro tools for quick responses, catering to customizable solutions for users.
Room for Improvement: Spiceworks struggles with scalability, especially for larger enterprises, and could enhance its ticketing and reporting capabilities. Users have noted the need for better monitoring tools and improved integration with external systems. Zendesk users seek improvements in side conversations, easier customization, and a more favorable pricing model, with some considering the reporting basic and the cost of advanced features high.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Spiceworks is mainly deployed on-premises, supported by a vibrant community that assists with technical insights, but it lacks formal customer service. Zendesk focuses on cloud and hybrid deployments, offering extensive setup options and providing substantial customer service with a global reach, aimed at more structured environments.
Pricing and ROI: Spiceworks appeals with a free model, making it attractive for SMBs, especially considering the high ROI and the time needed for setup. Zendesk requires more financial commitment, with costs depending on agents and feature sets. Despite potentially steep pricing, its advanced features justify the value for complex multi-channel support environments, with ROI linked to its metric leverage and customization.
I can tell you that we probably saved at least three employees full-time with the ticket management and the automation and the macros and the user follow-up being built in.
I feel that Zendesk helped us set up our platform for providing support way faster than other platforms due to its easy configuration.
We were able to offer a seamless 24/7 support experience and meet all our SLAs due to the robust nature of the platform.
There appears to be a lack of connection between the bot and the agents, making it feel scripted rather than helpful.
The technical support provided by Zendesk has been very satisfactory.
Their support team from Zendesk is excellent, similar to what you have in Freshdesk.
We have not hit a peak or a turn yet that Zendesk has not been able to go with us or been able to grow with us in the process, change or pivot that the company is making.
Zendesk can scale from very small companies to very large ones.
Zendesk's scalability is excellent.
They are always informing us with a status update and an ETA, and the turnaround time is usually within the same day with no extended downtime that would cause a detriment to our company.
Zendesk is quite stable; we experience major outages only once or twice a year, making it very reliable.
The stability has been quite reliable.
Zendesk could actually support HTML on the tickets so we could format our text better than the current options such as size, bold, italic, or underscored, because the text processing is too simple.
Zendesk is missing an AI aspect that could help provide quick answers based on the knowledge housed within the platform.
Zendesk is amazing, and because they are always working on a new upgrade or a new integration, they are very forward-thinking from an engineering perspective.
It is not the cheapest solution nor the most expensive, but it provides value for money.
The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Zendesk was quite expensive.
Additionally, it is free software.
It allows us to handle more support cases with fewer people due to its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
Zendesk is way cheaper than other ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow, providing a good platform at a lower price so we could offer good support with a low budget for the license.
Being able to put response counters on certain tickets and have certain ones that are high priority and have a tighter SLA than lower priority items, being able to categorize them as a question versus an urgent request, and being able to bucket them as feature requests or product enhancements.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Zendesk | 5.1% |
| Spiceworks | 1.3% |
| Other | 93.6% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 24 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 14 |
| Large Enterprise | 10 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 35 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 20 |
| Large Enterprise | 11 |
Zendesk Support is intuitive, and it's built with support agents in mind. Everything they need lives in a single, dynamic help desk interface so it's easy to be productive and manage customer interactions.
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